Following the hugely successful campaign for the new Pebble Time, Pebble is back with two new products: smartstraps and a whole new Pebble, the Pebbble Time Steel. Let's start with smartstraps - an idea so simple it's almost silly that Google and Apple didn't come up with it first.

Rather than trying to shove every sensor and doohickey into the Pebble Time, we decided to keep the watch simple and functional and give our incredible maker and developer community the opportunity to build from there. Up until now, if you wanted it all you had to compromise... On battery life, size, design or feature set. Not anymore.

That's why we created Pebble smartstraps. It's simple: straps can now contain electronics and sensors to interface directly with apps running on Pebble Time.

Second, the Pebble Time Steel. It's a more luxurious, metal version of the Pebble Time, but aside from its more premium feel and design, it also sports a larger battery (10 days of use instead of 7 days) and its screen is bonded with the glass. For the rest, it's identical to the Time. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm totally loving the gold version with the red band - for a square watch, it simply looks really, really good.

In fact, for me, that specific model is the first Pebble I'd consider wearing. It combines an attractive design with Pebble's superior (over Wear and the Apple Watch) functionality. This could be a winner.

Criminals in the US are using the new Apple Pay mobile payment system to buy high-value goods - often from Apple Stores - with stolen identities and credit card details.

Banks have been caught by surprise by the level of fraud, and the Guardian understands that some are scrambling to ensure that better verification and checking systems are put in place to prevent the problem running out of control, with around two million Americans already using the system.

The crooks have not broken the secure encryption around Apple Pay's fingerprint-activated wireless payment mechanism. Instead, they are setting up new iPhones with stolen personal information, and then calling banks to “provision” the victim’s card on the phone to use it to buy goods.

Since being diagnosed with Hodgkin Lymphoma (Stage IV) in late 2011, my life changed. Beyond the psychological and emotional consequences of how cancer affected me, my family, and my relationships, it is undeniable and abundantly clear that cancer took its toll on me from a physical perspective.

Last year, I decided to regain control of my body, my life habits, and my health. I started tracking everything I could about my activities, my exercise routine, the food I ate, and the time I spent working with my iPad instead of walking, sleeping, or enjoying time with my family. Since then, I've made a decision to not let cancer and its consequences define me any longer.

I want to be healthier, I want to eat better, and I want to take the second chance I was given and make the most of it. What started as an experiment has become a new daily commitment to improve my lifestyle and focus.

For the better part of the last five years the 35-year-old Swede was that guy, a man who constantly stressed about his creation, Minecraft, the bestselling computer game of all time. Even calling it a game is too limiting. Minecraft became, with 100 million downloads and counting, a canvas for human expression. Players start out in an empty virtual space where they use Lego-like blocks and bricks (which they can actually “mine”) to build whatever they fancy, with the notable feature that other players can then interact with it. Most players are little kids who build basic houses or villages and then host parties in what they’ve constructed or dodge marauding zombies.

Truly obsessed adults, though, have spent hundreds of hours creating full-scale replicas of the Death Star, the Empire State Building and cities from Game of Thrones. The word "Minecraft" is Googled more often than the Bible, Harry Potter and Justin Bieber. And this single game has grossed more than $700 million in its lifetime, the large majority of which is pure profit.

Google's Sundar Pichai has essentially confirmed reports that the company will become a wireless provider of sorts in "the coming months." During his appearance at Mobile World Congress today, Pichai acknowledged that Google is working with "existing partners" to create its own MVNO, but stopped short of confirming that Sprint and T-Mobile are those partnering networks, as has been rumored. But he did reveal that Google has been in contact with Verizon Wireless and AT&T about its plans - likely to head off any potential ugly conflict between Mountain View and the largest, most powerful providers in the United States. "Carriers in the US are what powers most of our Android phones, and that model works really well for us," he said.

Jolla has "introduced" Sailfish OS 2.0. It didn't really introduce it though as it's not available to anyone right now - it's only potentially available to OEMs.

The independent Sailfish OS is soon reaching a major milestone as it is scaling from smartphones to tablets with the introduction of the Jolla Tablet. The first shipments of Jolla’s second Sailfish OS product are expected to start in Q2/2015. At this point, Sailfish OS is maturing to the next generation, 'Sailfish OS 2.0', and is introducing e.g. a new enhanced user interface, support for Intel architecture, and previously unseen software integration capabilities for partners.

The new interface is interesting - it greatly simplifies all the gestures and seems to function much more like Harmattan on the N9. As awesome as all this sounds, this still doesn't address the biggest concern: applications. Some may be content running Android applications (poorly) on Sailfish, but I want the real deal. However, without - still - any word on paid applications, it doesn't seem like this issue will be addressed any time soon.

That being said - I'm an early backer for the tablet, and can't wait for it to arrive this May. I hope Sailfish OS 2.0 will find its way to my Jolla phone at around the same time.

Our best guess at this point is that the encrypted-by-default requirement was relaxed to give OEMs more time to prepare their hardware for the transition. The performance problems can be offset by using faster flash memory, faster file systems like F2FS, and chips that are better at encrypting and decrypting data quickly, but phones and tablets take long enough to design that OEMs will need time to make these changes. Whether the change in policy was prompted by external pressure or an internal decision isn't clear, but the performance explanation makes the most logical sense.

Ouch. It's pretty clear Google wanted to quickly gain some positive press, especially after Apple announced it would turn encryption on by default in iOS, but failed to look at any possible performance repercussions. Sleazy move.

The merger will also offer some relief to the private equity firms that bought Freescale at the height of the leveraged buyout boom, only to see the financial crisis bring the company low.

NXP is Dutch, and I have to admit, seeing a Dutch chip maker acquire Freescale makes me feel a little bit proud. Together with ASML, my little swamp does contribute at least something to the world of computing.

Samsung, naturally, is hoping to put the Galaxy S series back on people's radar as a top device, and it's doing so by starting afresh with the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge. Though it numerically follows the GS5, the Galaxy S6 bears little resemblance to the previous model, and marks a pretty significant change in the way Samsung designs phones. At the same time, the S6 edge picks up the fun parts of the Galaxy Note Edge and leaves behind the poor software experience.

There's a brand new design philosophy in play with the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge, starting with the radical hardware change and flowing into a more considered software experience. These are the phones that Samsung's hoping will change the perception of its devices in 2015 - let us show you what they're all about.

After HTC, Samsung was up. Most of the information regarding the new Galasy S6 and Galasy S6 Edge were leaked before their official unveiling, so we already knew what to expect. I'm particularly pleased with Samsung greatly simplifying TouchWiz, and the simplified camera interface and performance are very welcome too. The all-metal construction is nice, and I personally really like the Edge's curved display - not because of any software functionality, but because it just looks really nice and ergonomic.

During the unveiling event, one thing really stood out: confidence. Rarely have I seen Samsung personnel being this genuinely enthousiastic and confident about their new phones. They didn't resort to crazy antics or heavy buzzword dropping - they showed the device, its strengths, and that was it. For the first time, it felt as if Samsung truly believes the S6 and S6 Edge can stand on their own merit, instead of being held up by marketing and similar tricks.

My contract renewal is up later this year, and the S6 looks quite intriguing, and I haven't found any Samsung phone even remotely intriguing since the SII.

It's hard not to have high hopes for the HTC One M9. Its immediate predecessor and the first phone in this rebirth of the HTC's flagship line - that'd be 2014's HTC One M8 and 2013's M7 - were fan favorites, and highly regarded by those of us who critique phones for a living.

But those phones were not without their flaws. And as we've seen HTC slowly address its devices' shortcomings (while growing and innovating in other areas), it's been difficult to not expect it to finally get things - all the things - right.

At least that's what we've been hoping, especially when it comes to its one tragic feature: The inconsistent performance of its UltraPixel camera.

And that brings us to this. The HTC One M9. We've spent a little time with HTC's latest, and this is what we've found thus far.

The HTC One M9 - the new one, announced today - looks very similar to the M8, but of course with better specifications and updated software. As much as I think the One series might be the best Android phones out there in terms of build quality, I just can't get myself to like its overall design. I do hope, though, that the M9 sells in large enough numbers, because HTC is going to need it.

This long period can only be explained by how awesome Xfce 4.10 was. But as all things, it needed some refreshing - and for that we saw lots of new contributors providing valuable feedback, features and bugfixes. As always, Xfce follows its steady pace of evolution without revolution that seems to match our users' needs.

In this 4.12 cycle, we mainly focused on polishing our user experience on the desktop and window manager, and on updating some components to take advantage of newly available technologies.

Huawei is about to make its presence felt at MWC with the announcement of the Huawei Watch. The watch itself was first spotted yesterday on a billboard, but we now have full promo videos for this Android Wear-powered beauty that will be made official in a few hours. Posted to the Huawei YouTube channel, two videos walk through the design process for the watch and also show how cheesy Euros are when they take vacations with their brosephs.

Aside from the cheese, the videos do show one of the prettiest (this actually might be the prettiest) smartwatches we have seen to date. It features sapphire glass, a heart rate sensor, interchangeable leather or metal straps, crown, a bunch of classy watch faces, and a perfectly round watch face.

This thing is just gorgeous - full stop. Of course, it still has Android Wear which needs a lot of work, but it's clear that round is the way to go. Square just looks bulky, computery, and geeky.

The events of last week reinforce the principle that customer experience, security and privacy must be our top priorities. With this in mind, we will significantly reduce preloaded applications. Our goal is clear: To become the leader in providing cleaner, safer PCs.

We are starting immediately, and by the time we launch our Windows 10 products, our standard image will only include the operating system and related software, software required to make hardware work well (for example, when we include unique hardware in our devices, like a 3D camera), security software and Lenovo applications. This should eliminate what our industry calls "adware" and "bloatware." For some countries, certain applications customarily expected by users will also be included.

A step in the right direction, but still way too much wiggle room. Why, for instance, do they insist on shipping third party antivirus crap when Windows has its own, faster security software built right in? And what are "Lenovo applications"?

Although long talked about, the Ubuntu Edge campaign exemplified the concept best with its "super phone" boast: your phone would hook up to a monitor, mouse and keyboard and become a fully functioning Ubuntu desktop PC. Phone apps would run on the desktop in an appropriate guise like responsive websites do on phones.

My dream smartphone would be a phone that automatically turns into a PC the moment I get home. It knows I'm home, wirelessly and automatically hooks up to my display, mouse, and keyboard in my office, and done. Of course, it'd also automatically detect other displays and input devices in my house - say, a remote control and my TV.

With version 15.02, the Genode OS project complements its existing virtualization support for the x86 architecture with virtualization on ARM by turning their base-hw kernel into a microhypervisor. Besides virtualization, the most prominent underlying theme of the current release is the project's increasing focus on test automation and optimization.

Virtualization has a long history within the Genode project. After originally focusing on paravirtualized Linux kernels (L4Linux and OKLinux), the added support for the NOVA kernel and the Vancouver VMM in 2011 cleared the way towards hardware-based virtualization on the x86 architecture. In 2012, the project started exploring ARM TrustZone as another flavour of virtualization. With the Noux runtime, Genode introduced their take on OS-level virtualization. Finally, the transplantation of VirtualBox to NOVA last year marked the project's most ambitioned virtualization-related work. It enables VirtualBox to run as unprivileged user-level program on top of the NOVA microhypervisor.

During 2014, the Genode developers used those accumulated experiences to conquer another ground, namely the ARM virtualization extensions. The current release extends their custom kernel (called base-hw) with support for hosting virtual machines and adds a user-level virtual machine monitor that is capable of running an unmodified Linux-based system as guest OS. At a high level, it mirrors NOVA's virtualization architecture but for ARM-based systems. The microkernel/hypervisor implements merely the VM world switch and the virtualization of memory but leaves all the complex work to untrusted user-level virtual machine monitors. In fact, the added kernel complexity on account of virtualization support is less than 1,000 lines of code.

Besides the virtualization-related work, the base-hw kernel gained a further improved scheduler that takes IPC relationships into account, which is inspired by the pioneering work of NOVA. Furthermore, the project is happy to announce the principal ability to run Genode as secure-world OS on the upcoming USB Armory hardware platform.

Most of the other topics of the current release are concerned with improving the performance and stability of Genode-based system scenarios. The centerpiece of these efforts is a new tool kit for automating tests on a large variety of kernels and hardware platforms. In line with this overall theme, the new version vastly improves the user experience of VirtualBox on NOVA, comes with updated rump-kernel-based file-system support, and lifts long-standing scalability limitations on PC platforms.

Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut "Star Trek," died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83.

"Of my friend, I can only say this: of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... Human."

Fascinating inside scoop by WPCentral. According to them, there were very advanced talks between Microsoft and Pebble to come to a close partnership between the two companies. Microsoft built a fully functional Pebble application for Windows Phone with complete integration, offered to bundle Pebble devices with Windows Phone sales through Microsoft stores and carriers, and a whole lot more. All this was set to be announced at BUILD 2014.

However, it did not come to pass.

There is just one problem: Pebble founder and CEO Eric Migicovsky.

Despite Microsoft's attempts to win over Pebble, Migicovsky is reportedly not a fan of the company nor their mobile operating system. The young entrepreneur reportedly nixed any partnership.

Growing up in a world where Google and Apple have dominated the mobile scene, this perception that Microsoft is old and out of touch is seemingly more frequent these days. Particularly with those under 30 (see Snapchat's Evan Spiegel for a similar attitude). Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was unable to persuade him personally.

If I were to take an uneducated stab at why Pebble didn't go through with this, I think we need to look no further than Apple. Apple has its watch coming, and that alone would be incentive enough for Apple to start making the life of other smartwatch makers who want to be compatible with iOS very difficult. Now imagine if Pebble, to boot, had a close partnership with Microsoft, including preferential treatment for Windows Phone? Apple is not exactly know for not being incredibly petty.

Now, more than a year into the SteamOS era (measuring from that beta launch), the nascent Linux gaming community is cautiously optimistic about the promise of a viable PC gaming market that doesn't rely on a Microsoft OS. Despite technical and business problems that continue to get in the way, Valve has already transformed gaming on Linux from "practically nothing" to "definitely something" and could be on the verge of making it much more than that.

Progress has been amazing, and once Valve gets its SteamOS and Steam Machines, things should pick up even more.